Volu m e II - Purdue University Calumet

Ryan Clifford Smith
Purdue University Calumet
The Green Envy of Twain
One would be perhaps foolish, actually downright incorrect, in entering into a discussion about
literary realism without noting the heavy thumb that Mark Twain, or Samuel Clements depending on your
literary politics, has on the tail of the larger movement. Where it would be difficult to defend that Twain,
in all his loaming glory, had definitively begun the realism tradition, if there was a beginning to be clearly
accentuated, it would be equally difficult to support any idea that posited that Twain didn’t provide the
wind that fed the fire which eventually burned the romantic tradition the preceded him. Hemingway once
said, in his essay Green Hills of Africa, that "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark
Twain called Huckleberry Finn,” and if we contend that is true then we are only being responsible in
discussing Twain from such a perspective. Therefore, this essay begins there, with Twain taking step one
for American literature as a whole, step two being that which left his contemporaries existing in their own
way, but forever surrounded by the wide breadth of Twains arms, and step three being where he left
literature after he was gone and how American literature moved, not necessarily beyond Twain, but just as
one might try to earn a fathers trust with a legacy already gone.
Using Hemingway’s famous quote as our guide, we will start with his claim that “there was nothing
before” Mark Twain. To make such a claim is to be as brash as only Hemingway famously could be,
rejecting Nathanial Hawthorne and even Herman Melville almost completely by comparison. Where it does
seem to be fairly well supported that Hawthorne was, by no means, a realist in his prose, it is less cut and
dry with Melville. While if we could all agree that Moby Dick was almost completely and undeniably a
piece of romantic literature, Bartleby the Scrivener, published in 1853, is decidedly less easily
compartmentalized. Admittedly, concession is required in relation to how the prose is handled with
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